History and Growth

The chart below plots the increase in size of
freenode
over time. The network began as #linuxneo, a tiny GNU/Linux
support channel, created by Rob Levin in 1994 on EFNet IRC. That channel
soon changed its name to #LinPeople. By 1995, after moving to
Undernet and then DALnet, #LinPeople became a small network,
irc.linpeople.org. In early 1998, it became Open Projects
Net, with about 200 users and fewer than 20 channels.

In 2002, Open Projects Net became freenode,
a service of Peer-Directed Projects Center, a tax-exempt corporation.

Over the years, freenode has used a few
different IRC daemons. In 1999, we began using dancer, which was based on
IRCD-Hybrid. We switched to hyperion (based on dancer) in 2005. Since 2010,
freenode has used ircd-seven, based on charybdis.

Today freenode peaks
at around 85,000 users and contains around 40,000 channels.